The Fifth Book Has Finally, Officially Landed at Amazon.com. Finally.

LED Lighting.  Kirk's Fifth Book.

Of all the changes that technology's brought to photography one of the most interesting to me is how it's changed the way we light things.  The tools are transforming the vision of a generation.  Cameras with faster ISOs require less light but the light you do bring to the table is so much more controllable and easy to use than ever before.  While most still photographers use flash in some form I'm pretty certain that the future will call for more use of continuous light and more flexibility in choosing our tools.

I started using LEDs when Canon and Nikon and Olympus and Sony started putting really cool video capabilities in their cameras.  I wanted to see if I could open up some profitable markets for myself by adding video to the product mix I offer my clients.  While I'm not setting the world on fire with video, the simple interviews and web videos I've done put an extra $10,000+ in my accounts last year.   Not big money but if we work hard on improving every step I'm sure we can make those numbers grow, year by year.

So I got my first set of LED lights to augment available light with video but on the way to becoming the next Steven Spielberg I noticed that I was attracted to using the LEDs, more and more, for still life work where the WYSIWYG nature of continuous lighting made my shoot more efficient and productive.  Now I had a reason to jump in and learn with both feet.  So I bought more and bigger panels.  In effect, I slid into LED lighting the way you slide into a hot bath....just a toe at a time and then finally, the commitment, and the  plunge.

Now, a year and a half later, I've used the LEDs to light executive portraits, twilight portraits, complex (for me) food shoots, studio shoots with actors for Zachary Scott Theater, and some really fun and fast moving corporate reportage.  A few days ago I was asked to photograph some books in a three dimensional sort of way.  A few years back I would have been reaching for the electronic flash monolights and I'd start the "chimping" process.  I'd be setting up soft boxes and umbrellas and blah, blah, blah.  

With my bigger LED panels I just flipped the switch to "on,"  lined up the shot on the live view screen of my camera, set the aperture I knew I'd need to cover the book with sharp focus, adjusted the shutter speed until the live histogram looked correct and then tripped the shutter.  A quick, magnified look at the file and I was on to the next set up.  Color?  Perfect.  Just using AWB.  Perfect?  I finished in two hours what had taken me, in past "flash centric" shoots, perhaps four or five hours.

In the book I've written about choosing the right LEDs.  About the accessories that seem to work best for me working with the lights.  About using them for my favorite subject: Portraits.  There are over 250 images that illustrate every point.  The book is 160 pages long as is the culmination of a year and a half of research and "real world" use.  And then six long months of writing a re-writing.

I hope you'll take a chance and add this book to your library of photographic books.  I'll continue to update my knowledge base about LEDs and what's changing in the market place and share that information here.  What every writer in this day and age needs is the support of his audience.  In a way the books pay for and are the prime impetus for writing this blog.  Every book sold gives me time to explore, write and shoot more.

thank you.

Canon Designers Fail Again. My Overdue Review on a "Retro" Product.

When will all this retro nonsense stop?

I watched the Nikon rollout of the D800 a few days ago and it reminded me that Canon is on the ropes. For good.  Oh sure.  They're the biggest camera company in the galaxy (right now), design and produce their own incredible sensors, and just a few years ago the Nikon users were jumping in droves to get the white lenses, the super video, the full frame, the high ISO.  But now everything has changed and there's no such thing as continual "leapfrogging."  Canon is doomed.  DOOMED !!!  We all know it.  And I think I found the genesis of their hideous decline.  Someone asked me to review this camera (above)  and I was shocked with the primitive feature set.  I know it must be a current camera because it's so........retro.

It's called a Canonet QL17.   How cutesy.  It sports a prime 40mm lens with a fast, 1.7 f-stop but that's just about where the feature set ends....

Well,  here's my review:  The damn thing is unusable.  Let's go down the list of unredeemable flaws.  To start with, all that satiny metal finish is way too retro-ly conspicuous.  I've applied ample stealth tape in an attempt to tone down this grasping, faux modern design aesthetic as best I can.

The lens is FIXED.  Not that it was broken but,  I've learned now that any camera with a fixed lens is inferior to an interchangeable lens camera.  And zooms are best of all.  Who can do any kind of work without a fisheye and an extreme telephoto?  Read no further.  I'll warn you off right now.  This is not a birding camera.  Unless you relish the idea of tiny birds hidden in the recesses of your frames.  Dots, really. There's no reach at all. The lens is just a 40mm and that's on full frame !!!!  

But I just found out that the "full frame" imager is the same as the one used in the Nikon F full frame that we reviewed earlier.  It's not re-usable.  It's WORO.  Which means "write once, read once."  They used a sensor called "film."  It's very noisy over ISO 400,  and the camera doesn't have a lot of post processing tools built in.  In fact, it has none.  It's a very expensive way to run a camera.  But it's offset by having a MSRP of $149.95, new.

Continuing with the flaws you would have to add the lack of autofocus.  See the little knob just to the right of the lens in the photo above?  You pull that up or down to effect focus.  And the confirmation that you're doing a damn bit of good in the pursuit of focus is in a little window you look through.  Apparently this is a "rangefinder" camera.  Like that other retro copy, the Leica M9.  Come on, if you need the retro styling just get a Fuji X-100.  That's the real retro deal.

This camera may be one of the very few in the world without a menu. In fact, there's no electronic interface I could find.  You wiggle the stick for focus.  You watch fuzzy yellow blocks come together for focus and while I think there used to be a meter in the camera but the designers chose a battery that didn't "jump the shark" into the 21st century.  So your meter is all mental.  Kind of an "Abundance Metering" philosophy.  If you "think" good exposure then surely you will manifest good exposure.

The camera has a limited range of shutter speeds and those are only available in full stops.  Wanna shoot outside?  I don't think so.  The top shutter speed is 1/500th and God knows you can't do anything with that.  And get this.....the slowest shutter speed is 1/4th of a second.  Jeez.  No star trails here.

 There is a bulb setting and a self-timer but my test camera's self timer was obviously defective.  It buzzed like a savage honey bee every time I tried to use it.  Notice the steel and alloy construction.  Sadly it adds a lot of weight to what should have been a lightweight camera.  Don't those designers know about the joy of plastic?

Speaking of hopelessly retro, get a load of this.  It's a PC terminal for a sync cord.  And it's a "dumb terminal" not an interactive connection.  All it's good for is triggering flashes.  And, you guessed it, Canon "cheaped out" and didn't include any provision for "smart flash."  (Although they do have a provision for a primitive "guide number" flash.) Could they be more painfully retro?

And I'm sure you saw this coming...No LCD screen.  No way to preview or review your images.  It's almost like this camera is "capture averse."

This unit may represent an older part of Canon's line but it's an example of the company's obvious misdirection.  If they had launched products like this in the 1970's do you think they'd even still be in business today?

I'm waiting for an improved, eighty five megapixel verison with auto Hipstergram, auto HDR, auto Compose and auto Banter.  And, if Canon ever dumps the tired ass retro thing and comes into this century of camera design, let them know that I'm waiting for a red one.  Fire Engine Red.

In All Seriousness...The Canonet QL17 was my first real camera and was a constant companion for years.  I finally retired it to a place of honor in the equipment drawer when I bought my first Leica M3 with a 50mm Summicron.  The Canonet went with me to Paris back in 1978 and many of my favorite images came from that little, wonderful box.  It loaded quickly (hence the QL) and it gave me easy to print Tri-X negatives, roll after roll.  It was small, unobtrusive and quick to use.  The meter was acceptable but we took advantage of a useful tool, provided by Kodak, when we wanted fast and accurate exposure setting advice.  Every roll of Kodak film came packaged with a sheet of paper, and on that sheet was a little set of illustrations showing different light sources and recommended settings.  We'd tape the little paper strip onto the bottom of the camera, under Scotch tape, for quick reference.  And it worked better than matrix metering nearly every time.

The fast (and sharp)  lens and vibration free leaf shutter (flash sync to 1/500th), in concert with ISO 400 film, let me shoot with impunity in low light.  The rangefinder never front or back focused and was equally good in bright or dim light.  Your battery could go completely dead and all you would lose is the metering.  In all it was an incredibly condensed and compressed tool for shooting real life.  If you find one in good shape for a good price you might consider snapping it up.  It's a good intro camera for people who've never had the pleasure of using real film.

A time out from the new product mania.

I finished shooting a box full of books for one of my clients who publishes books about real estate and I was looking for something to cleanse my "visual palette."  I found this old Kodak folding camera that my mom sent me.  Apparently, it's been living in my parent's closet for a few decades.  It came from a relative's collection many years ago.

I cleaned it off and put it on one of my tripods and then thought about lighting.  I set up a different lighting design than I had ever tried before.  I placed a big, 1,000 LED light panel (the cheap, Chinese variants) on either side of the camera and used the barn doors to keep spill light off the gray wall that was, maybe, five feet behind the camera.  The LED panels were pretty close.  You can see the placement in the image below.  I expected the chrome parts to burn out and the dark areas to be noisy but it didn't turn out that way.  Even though the camera sits directly between the two lights I thought the overall effect was dramatic and pleasing.  I shot the set-up with a Panasonic GH2 and the 14-140mm lens.  When I opened the raw file in Lightroom I was delighted.  There wasn't much post processing to be done.  

My favorite aspect of the shot on top, and even more so in the middle frame (above) is the way the light falls off as it goes down the tripod legs.  I'm equally happy with the way the light falls off so quickly to the background that the wall goes black.  And, at ISO 160, I'm not seeing any noise in the shadows.  It's really nice performance for an inexpensive little system.  Once I finished shooting this I wrapped up everything and went into the house to have dinner with the family.  I can't decide which of the two above images I like the best.  The camera alone is nice and clean but the second image resonates with my inner photo nerd.  I wish I'd done the shot earlier because it would have made a nice addition to my book.  I'm anxious to try the same kind of lighting in a portrait set up so I can get that same rapid fall off.

Today was totally insane.  We had nearly 20,000 pageviews of my Olympus OM-D introduction.  This followed yesterday's big, web wide announcement of the Nikon D800.  The lure of the new cameras was palpable.  There was clearly credit card adrenaline in the air.  But when I looked at the new stuff I had a sense of having been there so many times before.  I'm starting to feel like Pavlov's sad little dog because I find myself drooling at the internet signal that tells me that new camera dog food is heading to my bowl.

In both instances the camera makers are moving their respective balls forward.  The Nikon may be the camera that pushes the medium format either off a cliff or into making a price competitive product for people who want or need a really large sensor.  It will certainly be strong bait for people who want the best you can get (conditionally--meaning: the best for under $5,000).  The promise of a 30+ megapixel camera is tons of detail and smooth tonality.  It may be overkill but that remains to be seen....  Wait a month and Canon will, no doubt, debut their answering salvo and the race will be on to lock down customers.  It's pretty much an easy sell.  Lots of dots and lots of good numbers for a pretty affordable price.  If you're an aspiring pro this is the kind of camera that popular wisdom will lead you to.  

The Olympus OM-D is the magic camera enthusiasts have been waiting for.  It's small and sexy and by all accounts it's going to be a very, very good picture taker.  But what is the real appeal of this whole micro four thirds niche?  Do you get it?  Can I explain it?  I'll try...

First of all, it's no longer "cool" to carry around huge cameras and lenses over your shoulders anymore as you go about day to day life.  It's kind of the equivalent of dragging around a huge laptop just to be able to cruise the web and read your e-mail at your favorite local coffee shop.  Get a tablet.  Save some table real estate.   

At the heart of it the appeal of the small, mirrorless cameras in general is that for all intents and purposes the image quality of these cameras is more than adequate for 95% of the kind of shooting and sharing that 95% of the people who are ardent photographers, want to do.  Really.  We might be shackled by nostalgia into thinking that only a "full sized" camera will work for us because "our" needs are specialized.  But really, if you aren't shooting a job or assignment you're probably sharing most of your photo output on someone's computer screen.  

I did another job today for the "book" client.  The first time we shot together I shot all the books with a full frame, "professional" camera and a dedicated macro lens.  But the client's only use for the images was as illustrations on their website and as product illustration on Amazon.com.  I'd be shocked if they were used any larger than 800 pixels on a side.  Today we shot the same kind of stuff on the Panasonic GH2 and, after I finished dropping out the backgrounds and doing my post processing, the images were equivalent to the earlier full frame shots.  The one difference I noticed in the actual shooting was that the increased DOF for the same angle of view meant that I didn't struggle to keep the product in focus at the cost of the effects of diffraction.  Oh, and the live view was much easier to use.  Oh, and the touchscreen was pretty cool for moving the AF sensor cursor around.  I guess my point is that while huge print sizes and ultimate quality are still the provence of the biggest camera sensor you can get it's not a binary equation for all photography.

The users of the m4:3 cameras that I know have all graduated from bigger cameras.  They are looking for great image performance in a package that's a good companion.  Small, easy to pack, light enough to carry for a full day and not in your face. Having graduated from the mainstream they seem to have left behind the idea that the camera itself conveys some level of competence to the photographer.  Now they just practice their craft for the joy of practicing their craft.

The other thing that seems attractive about m4:3rds is a side effect of the lack of the mirror.  The lens mount flange to sensor distance is much smaller and that means that every lens designed for longer sensor-to-flange or flange-to-film plane distances can, with an adapter, be mounted for use on these cameras.  That appeals to the experimenter, the do-it-yourselfer, and the glass epicureans who understand that all lenses have their own personalities and styles.  People routinely mount everything from long, fast Nikon telephotos to jewel-like Leica M lenses.  

But now the m4:3's have come of age. Both Olympus and Panasonic have started revving up the optical workshops and they've been introducing cutting edge prime lenses than can be designed to be optically better than lenses hobbled by having to clear a mirror.   A big gap between the lens and the sensor means that lens designers have to use retrofocus designs that are a compromise.  The new lenses made for the smaller format can be optimized for better wide open performance, better sharpness and higher contrast.

I think the graduates get that.  Maybe not the exact engineering but surely the idea that the lenses, even though small, are heavy hitters.  And they return really superb images.

Smaller, lighter, cheaper, designed for the hand, fully implemented EVFs and lots of other intangibles.  What's not to like?

Do I want one of the new OM-D's?  You bet.  Do I need it?  Not for a second.  I'm still happy with the Olympus EP2, spoiled by the EP3 and well satisfied with the workmanlike GH2.  Can we shoot jobs with these?  Of course.  Look to the destination.  Heading to the web?  Perfect.  Prints up to 20 inches? No problem.  Super impressive to clients?  Nope.  But that's a whole other story.

I'm not preaching for a total takeover of the market by mini-cameras.  I think there's a place for everything.  And I'm sure lots of other pros will be able to make the case for big Canons and Nikons and that may be true for them.  But the market isn't homogenous.  I think it's smarter to choose a camera that's fun and facile rather than following any of the herds and buying a camera that's just right for someone else.

Hope you're having fun.  There's never been a better time to enjoy photography.  Just don't let the obsession with gear ruin your fun...